


Cage

by quadrotriticale



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, POV Sam Winchester, POV Second Person, [rated T for Teen video game voice], major character death i Guess but its a lie its a huge fucking lie, take this from me, title is pretty self explanatory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-02
Updated: 2018-06-02
Packaged: 2019-05-17 03:19:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,092
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14824260
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quadrotriticale/pseuds/quadrotriticale
Summary: Something, you’re not sure what, isn’t right today.





	Cage

**Author's Note:**

> check that word count, wow, 3000 fucking words, im so fucking bad at length

Something, you’re not sure what, isn’t right today. Your equilibrium is off, you guess, you aren’t dizzy or unsteady, but something is wrong, everything seems out of place. You’ve had this feeling before and you think you’ve cobbled together what it’s supposed to mean, one thing or another about uncharted territory that doesn’t line up properly with your sleeping-and-waking premonitions that scare the hell out of your brother and unsettle you. Something somewhere went wrong then, or maybe right if it leads to a better outcome, but you don’t know and you don’t like testing the fates. What you see is usually accurate or close to what comes to pass, maybe someone says something different than you saw or moves in a way that accounts for nothing more than the outcome of an irrelevant coin flip in terms of continuity- whoever is supposed to die still dies, whatever is supposed to happen still comes to pass, the world and the timeline continues on the way they were supposed to like that minor inconsistency wasn’t relevant at all, because it wasn’t. The ultimate outcome of everything can’t be predicted by even the most gifted psychic, and you’re far from that. Your visions come on unexpectedly and generally at random, and when they happen, you try to keep it to yourself. Apparently you just seem like you’re spacing out when you have one now that you’ve gotten used to them, which you guess is pretty accurate. You don’t know what’s wrong, though, if you’ve seen what happens next, you can’t seem to pull up the memory. Maybe you haven’t seen it. Maybe it’s just your gut. Whatever the case, you have to play the waiting game.

You leave Bobby’s on Saturday night, riding shotgun in your brother’s car, dicking around on your phone to try and distract you from the anxiety that’s beginning to coil in your gut. You don’t sleep and you don’t really talk, he listens to music and occasionally hums along or sings half under his breath. It’s dark outside until it isn’t, and nothing is really out of the ordinary. You lean your head against the window when the sun starts to peak over the horizon and watch the sky morph colors- black to deep purples and blues, to reds and golds and that murky color that follows the path of the sun over the curve of the Earth until it gets too high and evens out. You’re on edge even if you’re tired, and you don’t think you could sleep. Dean doesn’t seem to notice. It’s comfortable and quiet, and nothing would seem out of place to you if it weren’t for your brain doing backflips in your stomach. You try to brush it off, to no avail. 

You pull into a little town an hour or two outside of Portland sometime much later in the day, set up shop in a seedy motel like you usually do. The feeling follows you there, too, and when Dean goes out to get dinner, you spend the time searching the room and whatever belongings weren’t kept in the car for anything abnormal but come up with nothing. You don’t really know what you would have been looking for. A hex bag, maybe some kind of cursed object. Still, everything is as it should be, as far as you can tell. Maybe you’re just being paranoid. 

You turn the TV on after that, try to pretend you weren’t rifling through your brother’s things while he was out. You set it on some brainless sitcom you don’t know the name of but have caught bits and pieces of on your travels, and lean yourself against the headboard of the bed. It’s quiet in the room, for the most part. The uneasy feeling doesn’t go away, but you do zone out. 

...That is, until the scene on the TV starts bug out. The frame freezes on a location just to the left of the action, characters bickering about something half off screen. Someone in the background walks into the centre of the frame and then continues walking to the left until he steps off set, camera following him the whole way. You can still hear the sound of the cast’s argument in the background even if you can’t see them, muffled voices bouncing off your eardrums. Your eyes don’t move from the man in the centre of the screen. You feel like you know him, like his face should be familiar to you even as his image starts to become misshapen, less and less human the longer you stare. Extra eyes, or arms, wings seem to seep into the edges if your awareness. He grins, some sort of indescribable atrocity that does nothing but fuel your rising terror. You feel like you know him, like you need to get as far away as possible from him, but you’re frozen. As the area behind him starts to melt away, he speaks, and you hear his voice through the grainy speaker of the motel’s television, too big and too loud and too in your head to make sense.

“So, how’s it going, Sammy?” 

Running on instinct and adrenaline, you pull a gun from your waistband that you don’t remember putting there, and unload a clip into the television. You hear cackling, still sounding like it’s coming from the grainy speakers of the now destroyed TV and everywhere else, and then the door breaks open and you turn the gun towards it in a jerky motion and barely miss your brother’s head, and he lets go of the paper bag in his hand. You drop the gun like it’s burning your hands once you recognize who it is you almost shot, tuck your legs to your chest, and bury your head in your knees and under your arms. Dean buzzes around you, fusses, keeps trying to discern what’s wrong with you. It takes you a while, but you manage to uncurl and explain to him what happened, what’s been going on. He fusses, of course he does, but insists at the end that you should just work the case you came here to work, try to get your mind off of it. You’re skeptical, and very shaken, but you do agree to it eventually. He gives you a smashed up taco from where he dropped the fast food bag on the floor, and you both agree that, since you destroyed the TV, it’s probably best to just sleep in the car. You can’t cover that kind of damage, damn. He drives you out to the parking lot of some dive bar, and you crawl into the backseat, fuss until he agrees to turn the radio off. 

Rest is fitful, but you wish it didn’t come at all. You keep jerking awake with nightmares of the same horrible… thing you saw on the TV. It taunts you, teases you every time you fall asleep. What’s going to happen next, Sam? it… he, you think, asks you, eyes red and horrible and innumerable. How am I going to kill him this time? Huh? Come on, guess, it’s fun. He speaks in your ears and your mind and somewhere you don’t know the name of, didn’t know existed, feels like it’s bursting into flames with every syllable. In your dreams you know who he is, you call him by his name even as you cower and burn before him. When you’re awake, Dean fusses over you, asks you if you’re alright, asks for details of the dreams because he doesn’t want to exclude the possibility that it’s not just sleep dep hallucinations coming back to fuck with you. Maybe it’s some kind of monster, he thinks, even calls Bobby to ask about things that can invade dreams. You appreciate it. 

Morning comes eventually, thankfully, curled up around the rising sun and peaking through cloud cover like it hasn’t quite worked up the energy to open its eyes yet. You feel pretty much the same. Your brother buys you a slightly excessive amount of espresso, chats to you about the case you’re following, and you wonder to yourself where he found the time to get the details. He explains to you that you’re after ghouls, and then proceeds to inform you that he fucking hates ghouls like you didn’t already know that. You manage to laugh at that, even though you’re still shaken up and the anxiety that’s been nagging at you for a few days already hasn’t gone away. It seems to put him at ease a little bit, and he continues talking. He tells you he found out where they’re holed up, and when you ask him how, he tells you he did some investigating while you slept last night. Something about that doesn’t rub you the right way at all, but you don’t question it further. The radio, when he turns it on, sounds… wrong, but you can’t place the reason why, and it nags at the back of your mind until you arrive in a small graveyard, and he shuts it off. Dean asks if you’re alright, because apparently you look like you’re bugging out, and you lie, tell him you’re fine even though you know something is wrong. You follow him around to the back of the car, and he hands you a machete, grabs one and a flashlight for himself, and shuts the trunk of the car. 

You follow him to a mausoleum, while he explains quietly that they’d started feeding on live people- that’s where the bodies came in, he says, and you’re sent for a bit of a loop because you don’t remember bodies, and you suddenly you don’t really remember any details of this case, or why you’re here, or what’s going on. You feel like you should know it, like you’ve been told it, or you found it, or… you don’t know, but something is wrong, for sure, and that uneasiness in your gut, your anxiety, is setting off alarms in your head like mad. Still, you follow your brother. You’re hunting ghouls, you tell yourself, you need to focus on that. You can deal with whatever it is that’s wrong with you later. Dean doesn’t notice your panic, this time, and continues towards the mausoleum. It’s nothing too impressive, an old, stone building affixed with holy symbols, the name of the family buried in it above the door, partially worn away. It’s open, which you find strange. You follow your brother inside, and he enlists your help in pushing aside the coffin to reveal a set of worn out steps leading into darkness. It all seems a little too cliche to you, but you follow him down anyway. He lights his flashlight, and you get a good look around the room. 

It’s like something out of a slasher movie. Pieces of corpses, both fresh and old, fill the dark room. You can see several coffins stacked on shelves on the walls, most of them opened and ransacked. The room stinks of decay, and you don’t think you’re ever going to get used to the smell of rotting flesh. You tuck your face into the collar of your shirt like it’ll do any good. You don’t see the ghouls until it’s too late- apparently they were hiding in the corner of the room, and they go after the both of you simultaneously. You grapple with one, try to keep it away from you, try to get it down, and you manage to lose track to your brother in the fray despite how tiny the room is. It takes a bit, of course it does, and you hear fighting noises beside you, but you eventually manage to get a proper hand on your machete and behead the monster. You give Dean a hand now that you’re free, chop the thing’s head off efficiently. You pull him to his feet, and he whines about being covered in ghoul blood. He wipes a bit off his face with his sleeve, and the two of you head back upstairs. 

It’s sort of by accident that you lose track of him in the graveyard. He tells you he’s going to clean up the scene a little, tosses you the keys and sends you to go get the car. You do as you’re asked, hurry through the graveyard to the Impala and bring it through as carefully as you can. He’s not there when you get close. Of course he’s not. You see his flashlight on the ground, his machete tossed a little ways away, and panic starts to settle in your stomach. You call out to him, check the inside and the underground portions of the mausoleum before you extend your search to the surrounding graveyard… and it doesn’t take you long to find what you were looking for. There was a third ghoul, must have run off when you started shouting. You shake, fuss over him even though you know there’s nothing to fuss over. This can’t happen tonight. This isn’t supposed to happen. This isn’t right, this isn’t right, this is wrong, you know something’s wrong, it has to be this-

His eyes are glassy, his neck torn out. You watch the grass around him soak up his blood for a minute. Something in the back of your head says, resigned and upset, that this doesn’t get easier no matter how many times you have to see it, and you don’t know what it means because you’ve never seen your brother die before, you don’t think you have. There’s a ghoul somewhere in this graveyard still, and you’re scared of it, maybe, but you just sort of sit there with your head in your knees and your hands tugging at your hair and hope it kills you too. You think you should call Bobby, but you don’t. You know you need to find what killed him, and you know it’s weird that it didn’t take his body with it because it’s a fucking ghoul, it’s an all parts of the buffalo kind of monster, but you don’t move for a while. The sun is peeking up when you finally move, uncurling yourself and standing, picking up your brother’s body as carefully as you can in the process and striking back out in the direction of the car. Something in your head tells you to sit back down and take a break because God, do you need it, but you don’t listen to it. You think about a lot of things while you walk- about revenge and about Bobby and about how you’re going to have to burn the body. Your face is wet and your sure your hands would still be shaking if you weren’t holding him, but you try to ignore it. 

There’s a man sitting on the hood of the Impala that you don’t recognize until you do. He doesn’t look quite like he did in your dreams, or on the television, but you know it’s him by the angle of his shoulders and the sharp way that he grins, the emptiness of his eyes. Fear hits you like a truck, and you want to run, but you freeze instead. Your brother’s body sort of… disintegrates in your arms. You want to hide, you don’t even want to draw your gun. He- Lucifer, applauds you, says something about the “performance” that you put on that you’re too terrified to really register. He seems disappointed when you don’t respond, asks you why you aren’t running, or trying to shoot him, because apparently you do that a lot, but you can’t pull the memories, and you don’t know what he’s talking about because his form starts to shift in the edges of your consciousness and you want to scream. 

The scene starts to dissolve, comes apart at the seams in all the ways you expect it to because it does this so much that you’re used to it, and you’re back in the same formless void you’re so painfully fucking used to… and you remember things now, because of course you do, you always do, he only lets you have all your memories when you’re here and that’s just how it is and how it’s been for longer than you really know. He tells you how long it’s been sometimes, like he’s been keeping tally on a wall that doesn’t exist, but time doesn’t really mean anything in the cage. He badgers you to respond until he’s sure that you aren’t going to, and you’re beyond fighting what he does to you, so you let it happen because there’s nothing you can do to stop it anyway. 

...And this happens for a long time after you give up. He seems to delight in tormenting you, and you guess there isn’t much else to do around here. When you’re yanked out proper, it’s strange. You don’t recognize the… thing that pulls you out, the quiet, ceaseless emptiness that somehow manages to possess a consciousness. It introduces itself as Death, on the way up, and you remember Death from before, vaguely, you can’t recall what it looked like, but you know it wasn’t this. It doesn’t say much else to you because you won’t talk, but you think also because it doesn’t have much to say. It’s… oddly comforting in a way that you aren’t used to and don’t really know how to describe. It puts you back where you should be, hides one hundred and eighty (it tells you that’s how long you’ve been there and you think you’d feel something if you weren’t so tired) years of your life behind a wall, and bids you good luck. 

Dean hugs you like he hasn’t seen you in years, and you cling to him tighter than you think makes sense, and you don’t really understand why you missed him so much, or why there’s uneasiness coiling in your gut. You brush it away, and no one jumps out to tell you that he isn’t real. You don’t know why he wouldn’t be. 

(It happens later, something in your brain starts yelling at you that he’s fake, that this is fake and you’re still somewhere that you don’t remember being, and then you start to remember things and everything starts to fall apart, and you start seeing Lucifer’s grotesque, horrible, shifting form again like he’s seeped into your brain and won’t let you dislodge him, but you survive that. Things don’t ever really go back to normal.)


End file.
